Before I start anything, I just want to say that I don't own, claim to own, reap any financial benefit, or plan to reap any financial benefit from anything I mention here. I arrange music for fun--it's a hobby--not because I plan to sell it in any way or anything like that. All of these songs belong to the wonderfully talented people who wrote/composed them. I've never composed anything. As a side note, I do sometimes wonder, when composing music, do you write each part one-at-a-time or all the parts at once?
Well, I've been arranging music by ear for a long time, now. It's been four years since I arranged my first piece of music, Mark Shultz's "Letters from War," just the melody, for cello, and six years since I transposed my first piece, "Edelweiss" from The Sound of Music, from treble cleft to bass cleft. Since then I've arranged songs in all three clefts, I've arranged a duet, Aladdin's "A Whole New World" for violin and cello, and two songs with part of the harmony, "A Whole New World" and Ludo's "Part 4: Morning in May," which was a duet for two violins. I meant to arrange Ludo's entire Broken Bride rock opera for orchestra at one point, but I never quite got to it...
Unfortunately, in the past year, I haven't really had time to arrange any music because of a schedule that was so full it was practically air-tight, so when I got my keyboard out last weekend it was a little dust and I had to buy a new cord because the old one is now missing, but the new cord was worth it, because I had an idea for a massive project that I already started. The plan is to arrange the soundtrack for the musical, Wicked, for orchestra by ear. It's a project that will probably take an upwards of a year because of the shear volume. The musical has an hour-and-a-half-long soundtrack and twenty songs, if you include "The Wicked Witch of the East," which I do, nineteen if you combine the "I'm Not that Girl" reprise and "As Long as You're Mine," which I will. Then, you consider that I will have to write out each part of each song. All nineteen songs have a first violin, second violin, viola, and cello part, and all of the excluding "Dear Old Shiz" and "A Sentimental Man" have a bass part, and then all of them except "Dear Old Shiz" have at least one featured part. "Dancing Through Life" has five.
Now that I'm typing this all out, I'm beginning to wonder what I've gotten myself into. It's a really good thing I already started, or I might be temped to quit right here and now. As it is, I've already finished the featured violin part (Glinda's part) for "No One Mourns the Wicked," which was...a process, because that song is much harder to count than you can imagine if you haven't tried--I think I spent a total of three or four hours just trying to get the time signature right--and I'm about halfway done with the first violin part. I started on Tuesday and I've been getting in a solid two to four hours a day of working on this. I'm sure that will taper off some, because I know there will be days when I really don't feel like working or I just don't have time, but for now, this will do.
Well, that's about all I've got to say right now, so over and out.
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